The collapse of a once promising project
After a huge launch in 2022, the smart bicycles across Imphal are rusting away. The problem is not awareness: its just that the project was not maintained afterwards. Also, many people, especially elderly, found the service very hard to use.
This policy of "launch and let it rot" cannot continue. Every few years, the government launches something then it is forgotten, then it breaks. Then a new project is started. The 2023 conflict did distrub implementation, but it just showed the extreme brittleness of the project.
And now, all that's left are half-completed projects, wasted taxpayer money and dashed hopes.
Just a few years back, the Imphal Smart City mission installed smart tags to track garbage collection. But where are they now? It seems they got silently removed sometime in 2023-24.
There are very few mentions online of this scheme, nevermind its removal, so some parts might be missing.
The pedestrian-friendly pavement at Thangal Bazar has been torn up, to make way for the paving of new concrete road. 550 crores have been allocated to the mission as a whole, of which 5.6 crores has been allocated to the Mall Road project. How much of it has been wasted?
Less than 100 crores of the concrete road laying project has been spent, according to the Sangai Express. Concrete roads of the same length generally cost Rs. 15-25 lakh, which could have easily been avoided.
The amount of money wasted is around the range of 5.7 crores.
The mission began in 2016, with 24 projects allocated. Now, only 17 are complete, far missing deadlines. Weak governance and negligence is the root cause of these problems.